Word: archipelago
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TOMAS DE BERLANGA, BISHOP OF Panama, named them Las Encantadas--the Enchanted Isles--in 1535, and more than 4 1/2 centuries later, it's hard to argue with his view of the Galapagos archipelago. Even today, the cluster of islands, a province of Ecuador that lies some 600 miles off the South American coast, seems idyllic: the giant tortoises known as galapagos, which gave the islands their name, still amble across the scrubby landscape, sea-lion pups and Galapagos penguins gaze unafraid at scuba divers, marine iguanas crawl over volcanic rocks along the shore, and strolling tourists have to detour...
...scientists and conservationists, the answers are crucial. The Galapagos is not just an exotic vacation spot; it is a unique ecosystem where biology and geology have gone to bizarre and instructive extremes. The archipelago's 15 main and 106 smaller islands are dotted with the volcanoes that gave birth to the Galapagos more than 3 million years ago; some are still active. Opuntia cactus, spiny acacias and palo santo trees have taken root amid the hardened lava of the lowlands. On some of the largest islands, the higher elevations have patches of dense, moist forests dominated by Scalesia trees, which...
Every year on Sept. 1, on the anniversary of the 1923 earthquake that took 143,000 lives in Tokyo and Yokohama, the Japanese observe national Disaster Prevention Day. All over the archipelago, schoolchildren rehearse running through tunnels of smoke with handkerchiefs covering their faces; the military practices helicopter rescues. In countless towns and cities, fire departments roll out their earthquake-simulation machines. These room-size boxes, equipped with a table, two chairs, a bookshelf, a gas cooking stove and a kerosene heater on a wooden floor, are set on shock absorbers and shudder exactly like an earthquake, escalating in force...
Genovese's broadside, to some European intellectuals, is merely one new entry in an old and familiar debate that has been particularly vibrant in France. The 1973 publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago was a critical event for the French left. His searing expose of the vast Soviet prison-camp system, which sold 600,000 copies in France in less than a year, inspired a cadre of ex-radicals eventually known as "The New Philosophers" to issue its own critiques of communism. In Barbarism with a Human Face, for example, Bernard-Henri Levy demanded that French radicals confront...
...BEEN THROUGHOUT HIS 26 years of rule, when President Suharto talks, Indonesia listens. But in a political system so secretive that even insiders have a hard time figuring out what is being said around the President's office, residents of the archipelago nation are turning to a new source to follow the inner workings of the government. DeTik, an upstart weekly newspaper, is addressing once off-limits political and social issues, pushing the envelope of the permissible. Last week the government reacted with a warning shot that has observers wondering if the paper has perhaps pressed its luck...